Difficult Reading: Frustration and Form in Anglophone Caribbean Fiction

By Jason R. Marley

Difficult Reading offers a new approach to formal experimentation in Caribbean literature. In this insightful study, Jason Marley demonstrates how the aggressive, antagonistic elements common to the mid-twentieth-century Caribbean novel foster emotional responses that spark new forms of communal resistance against colonial power.

Marley illustrates how experimental Caribbean writers repeatedly implicate their readers in colonial domination in ways that are intended to unsettle and discomfort. In works such as Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation, Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder, and Vera Bell’s overlooked prose poem Ogog, acts of colonial atrocity—such as the eradication of Indigenous populations in Guyana, the construction of the Panama Canal, or the disenfranchisement of Afro-Jamaican communities—become mired in aesthetic obfuscation, forcing the reader to confront and rethink their own relationship to these events. In this way, new literary forms engender new forms of insight and outrage, fostering a newly inspired relation to resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780813950150

Book preview

Cover Page for Difficult Reading

Difficult Reading

New World Studies

Marlene L. Daut, Editor

Difficult Reading

Frustration and Form in Anglophone Caribbean Fiction

Jason R. Marley

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2023 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2023

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marley, Jason R., author.

Title: Difficult reading : frustration and form in anglophone Caribbean fiction / Jason R. Marley.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2023. | Series: New World studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023012232 (print) | LCCN 2023012233 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813950136 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813950143 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813950150 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean fiction (English)—History and criticism. | Caribbean fiction—20th century—Political aspects. | National characteristics, Caribbean, in literature. | Frustration in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.

Classification: LCC PR9205.4 .M37 2023 (print) | LCC PR9205.4 (ebook) | DDC 813/.5099729—dc23/eng/20230531

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012232

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012233

Cover art: Another Call From Africa, Turgo Bastien, 2009

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Aesthetics of Inscrutability in Caribbean Fiction

1. The Politics of Interruption: Metafictive Critique and Historical Aporia in the Midcentury Jamaican Novel

2. To Become So Very Welsh: Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation and the Effacement of Afro-Caribbean Identity

3. Language as Animosity: Pejorative Speech and National Identity

4. The Menace from the Bush: Abstraction and Indigenous Violence in the Work of Wilson Harris and Denis Williams

5. Rhysian Disgust and the Politics of Complacency

Coda: Inscrutable Pasts, Inscrutable Futures

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I should begin by acknowledging that this book—a work that, at its core, is a study of difficulty and making sense of that which cannot be easily made sense of—was, through an unfortunate coincidence, completed at a time when nothing made sense, and the coronavirus pandemic made every day uncertain, uneasy, and often inscrutable. Among the uncertainty and isolation, this book would not exist without Gina Lachacz, whose love, advice, and encouragement has inspired this book at every turn. Words can never express my gratitude and gratefulness.

I am particularly thankful for the support of Eric Brandt and Marlene Daut and the University of Virginia Press, whose enthusiasm for the book has never wavered (even in its early stages) and whose guidance and clarity has been a model of professionalism.

I am also indebted to the three anonymous readers who reviewed this book and its initial proposal. This book has evolved enormously as a result of their careful and courteous feedback, which was continuously thorough, supportive, and critical when it needed to be. I am a better scholar because of their feedback—and this book bears their mark and influence in innumerable ways. Academic labor is often a thankless task and, for those readers who may now be reading this book, please know that I am eternally grateful for your time and energy. It will not be forgotten.

A version of chapter 2, "To Become So Very Welsh: Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation and the Effacement of Afro-Caribbean Identity" was originally published in ariel: A Review of International English Literature in 2018 (49, no. 2) and is republished here in revised form courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Press and the journal. Thank you for the opportunity to reprint this material.

This book was aided by the generous financial support of Francis Marion University, including several summer research grants that aided its completion, as well as sizable funding to attend conferences and present many generative versions of the ideas that are presented in this book. I am immensely thankful for this support of my work. I also want to give a special thank-you to the English department, and my colleagues at Francis Marion as a whole, who have provided continued encouragement of my research. In particular, Chris Washington, Benjamin Hilb, and Dillon Tatum have offered innumerable insights and advice in completing the book. Thank you!

I would also like to thank Damien Keane, Christina Milletti, and Bill Solomon at the University of Buffalo for their mentorship. Their scholarship has influenced me in ways that I could never properly articulate here. Though the years fade and memory grows feeble, please know I remain entirely thankful for your guidance and for believing in my work.

Difficult Reading

Introduction

The Aesthetics of Inscrutability in Caribbean Fiction

In 1932, frustrated by submissions to their short story contest, the editors of Trinidad’s experimental literary and political journal Beacon published a bitter, antagonistic invective that was directed, surprisingly, at their own audience. The somewhat infamous editorial, released after the group failed to receive what they perceived to be any worthwhile submissions for the contest, boldly asserted that their readers were incapable of creating confident, valuable art. It should be noted that the Beacon’s castigation of their audience in the article was not subtle, and that they attributed the failure of their contest to a wider sense of Caribbean self-loathing and complacency, arguing that the average Trinidad writer regards his fellow-countrymen as his inferiors, an uninteresting people who are not worth his while. He genuinely feels (and by this, of course, asserts his own feeling of inferiority) that with his people as characters his stories would be worth nothing (Local Fiction 1). As the group saw it, Caribbean writing of the 1930s was mired in a state of stagnancy, and the failure of the short story contest was indicative of a larger aesthetic crisis in the region that suggested Caribbean authors were hesitant to write about the experiences and struggles of their own people. The Beacon group thus responded with anger and, as they would do time and time again, sought to enact, via a violent, aggressive jostle, the creation of a more innovative and political literary aesthetic in the Caribbean.

Repeatedly, the Beacon group viewed themselves as guardians of an emerging aesthetic that repudiated colonial literary influence, and they tirelessly chastised aspiring and established authors for relying too heavily on British aesthetic forms. Despite their harsh rhetoric, the group’s ethos was rooted in guidance and instruction—and, above all, in its literature and political writings, the Beacon sought to provide a model of literary development in the Caribbean. As Albert Mendes, editor of Trinidad and a key member of the Beacon group, affirmed, [The group] established the norms—dialect, way of life, racial types, barrack-yards, West Indian character and poverty—and these were postulates that bought a West Indian literature into being (75). As Mendes’s statement reveals, he, along with figures like editor Albert Gomes, viewed the Beacon as the forebearer of a burgeoning literary tradition—and, indeed, it is not entirely misplaced to suggest that the group was in part responsible for establishing a number of key themes and tropes that would pervade Caribbean literature throughout the twentieth century.¹ Much like George Lamming’s antagonistic, seminal essay, An Occasion for Speaking, the group’s editorials are often anthologized today as a call to arms, or as a moment of artistic awakening that ushers in the emergence of a Caribbean literary aesthetic. Viewed this way, the Beacon group’s confrontation with Trinidad’s literary scene in the 1930s is revolutionary in its antagonistic aims, and the group’s overt anger, juxtaposed against texts like Roger Mais’s incendiary anticolonial manifesto Now We Know (1944) and Lamming’s seething disgust directed at the Caribbean middle classes in The Pleasures of Exile (1960), capture an overarching sense of unyielding disgust and confrontational resentment toward both the colonial authority and the placated Caribbean masses. For Mendes and Gomes, the Beacon was less a magazine than a societal model of aesthetic and political resistance.

Although the Beacon published a considerable number of important, inventive literary works, the fact remains that the group struggled to dictate the prerequisites of a successful Caribbean aesthetic to its audience—in part because the model they provided was often deeply contradictory. The group’s often explicit resentment for their audience is thus more complicated than it first appears, particularly because their middle-class authors were fairly disconnected from the peasant and lower-class Trinidadians that they often wrote about. In this regard, the group’s emphasis on rupture, revolution, and anticolonial aesthetics is not, as Leah Rosenberg has convincingly pointed out, as innovative as it seems, as the Beacon’s middle-class politics were at odds with the revolutionary nature of their literary efforts. As Rosenberg has observed in Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature, "While scholars are correct in claiming that the Beacon established a new and powerful national aesthetics, they are mistaken in viewing the aesthetics as reflecting a radical new politics that would empower the working class. With respect to key political issues, the Beacon was significantly more conservative than contemporary black middle-class and Indi-Trinidadian organizations" (126). More troublingly, however, was the fact that, juxtaposed against an antagonistic petition to produce a new Caribbean aesthetic that eschewed the British tradition—an aesthetic largely focused on narratives depicting the lives of Trinidad’s lower classes—its pages also contained an excoriation of the Black working class, a thoroughly racist teardown of the value of African art and culture, and a rejection of universal suffrage (Rosenberg 126).² In this way, the group expressed and championed, to some degree, principles of colonial ideology that explicitly undermined the agency and humanity of colonized peoples, while nevertheless publishing literature that vehemently argued against the perpetuation of such rhetoric. The group wrestled, in other words, with its own intentionality; many of its literary aspirations and public decrees were rooted in a demand for a pro-Caribbean and anti-British aesthetic, but the articles and guidelines published in the Beacon’s pages provided little in the way of a sustainable or consistent ideological or literary model.³

Nevertheless, throughout its duration, the editors of the Beacon continued to express significant consternation that their audience was not following their instruction, when, in fact, their instruction was seldom as clear, convincing, or consistent, as they believed.⁴ In any case, it is clear that the group’s aesthetic aims, which privileged a focus on the experiences of the Trinidadian lower classes, could not be properly articulated in a way that would result in a body of work that mirrored the kind of literature they desired and expected from their audience. What I find interesting here is that the group’s resentment for the masses indicates, first and foremost, a crisis of instruction and understanding. Far from revealing a cohesive Caribbean aesthetic, the Beacon articulated a muddled discourse of anticolonial resentment that required persistent clarification and a repeated acknowledgment that the aesthetic the group sought to create was failing to emerge. The group’s aesthetic guidelines could thus be neither clearly articulated nor understood.

In highlighting this example, my goal is not to emphasize the fact that the Beacon’s message was hypocritical—though it was, to be sure—or to suggest that the group’s contributions should be viewed as a failure. Rather, I begin with this example because the complex interplay of misunderstanding and confusion that emerges as the group struggles to define a Caribbean aesthetic says more about the difficulty of articulating anticolonial resistance than a properly anticolonial, didactic literature ever could. Indeed, the group’s prevailing sense of frustration, confusion, and genuine bewilderment that their audience could not implement their intended strategies does much to elucidate the challenges and occlusions that threaten the emergence of effective resistance. In this sense, I am compelled by the group’s push for an antagonistic rupture that they cannot initiate, a rupture that becomes inscrutable—a call for a radical break that ultimately cannot be properly or consistently articulated. Reflecting back on the group’s work today, one of the most significant aspects of the Beacon is not its precursory yard fiction or its emphasis on a peasant aesthetic, as critics have tended to focus on, but in its tense, difficult relationship with its audience: a point that raises larger questions about reception, form, clarity, and resistance, and the very potentiality that literature may serve as a means to enact social change. In short, I am interested in the relationship between the attempt to create new anticolonial aesthetic forms and the feelings of failure—and, more importantly, frustration—that emerge in trying to articulate those very forms. What can such moments of failure and frustration tell us about colonialism, trauma, and the very nature of Caribbean literary aesthetics?

Difficult Reading, simply put, is a book about frustration. At its core, I contend that rethinking the role of frustration in terms of its effects on the audience may deliver newfound insights into Caribbean literary aesthetics. As such, my goal is relatively straightforward, in that I seek to highlight a unique body of experimental Caribbean anglophone literature that foregrounds questions of reception and difficulty to argue that inscrutability can function as a productive strategy to confront the legacy of colonial trauma. In the texts I address, the struggle to articulate the nature of colonial oppression—and to connect to the audience—captures the inherent trauma of Caribbean identity in a way that demands readers take an active role in dismantling the often disorienting, obfuscated reality of colonial violence. In other words, the questions and issues inadvertently raised by the Beacon group, particularly those concerning reception and scrutability, became an increasingly important problem within the field of Caribbean twentieth-century literature, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, as writers wrestled not simply with how to incorporate national and anticolonial themes of resistance into their writing, but with the central question of whether or not these themes could be clearly articulated at all. Difficult Reading, therefore, pinpoints an alternative current of experimental Caribbean literature by writers such as Denis Williams, Eric Walrond, and Vera Bell, as well as by more canonical Caribbean experimental writers, that demonstrates how an inability to process, understand, and enunciate the stakes of colonial oppression can itself function as a decolonial aesthetic. I view such works as invested in a search for expression or method outside the colonial purview in a way that continuously urges readers to evaluate and question both the clarity and meaning of what they read. More importantly, such works encourage, and in many ways force, the reader to acknowledge that the trauma of colonial ideology cannot simply be articulated as such, but must be actively unraveled if it is to be properly confronted and potentially understood.

Central to the theory of inscrutability I outline in this book is a rethinking of the role of reception in terms of Caribbean aesthetics. The struggle to represent (or even imagine) a worldview or narrative landscape free from the reverberations of colonial violence fosters a narrative space that is disorienting, confusing, and, above all, inscrutable. In the works I discuss, the seeming inescapability of colonial modes of thought and the frustrating struggle to escape and imagine new forms thus demands a uniquely Caribbean form of readerly engagement that compels the reader to confront the aporias wrought by the colonial project. Thus, the diverse subset of anglophone experimental Caribbean texts I address build off the central problematics of reception, innovation, and form ushered in by the Beacon group. They privilege inscrutability to capture the frustration and disorientation that emerges from not simply resisting or creating anticolonial forms, but acknowledging that these forms and these alternatives are inherently difficult to be made sense of or reconciled concretely or logically. The reader must thereby engage forms of colonial violence in new ways, as such works effectively narrate and reveal a desperate attempt on the part of the text to divest and divert itself from colonial doctrine, but often struggle and fail to do so, resulting in narrative forms that engender an experience of immense frustration. This book rethinks the relationship between formal experimentation, reception, and colonial trauma and examines how such texts—texts of immense difficulty and frustration—might be productively read. In so doing, I hope to articulate a uniquely Caribbean theory of aesthetic innovation that may allow us to rethink the implications of difficulty and frustration in ways that provide a new methodology for examining not only experimental Caribbean fiction but also the nature of colonial oppression itself.

Inscrutable Histories

The historical focus of this book is rooted in an examination of experimental mid-twentieth-century Caribbean fiction, focusing specifically on the fifty-year period between the late 1920s to the early 1970s. While the anglophone emphasis of this study may on the surface appear exclusionary, my emphasis on midcentury anglophone Caribbean texts—many of which have received little critical attention, fallen out of favor, or been ignored altogether—follows David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity, Alison Donnell’s Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature, and J. Dillon Brown and Leah Reade Rosenberg’s Beyond Windrush in suggesting that we need new models for thinking beyond stale narrative frames of anticolonialism, Windrush exile, and peasant experience in Caribbean literature. The mid-twentieth-century anglophone Caribbean canon remains in need of rethinking, as many Caribbean authors and texts—such as that of Denis Williams, Vera Bell, and Lindsay Barrett, among others—remain largely ignored and understudied, and criticism on more canonical writers like Roger Mais has become stagnant. There is, in much the same way, greater attention needed for the often unacknowledged formal intricacy of the period—especially in terms of the novel. This is, of course, not to say that questions of form and difficulty are in any way exclusive to the anglophone Caribbean, as francophone Caribbean literature is rooted in surrealism and the baroque and also addresses key issues of formal frustration, but, rather, that critics of the mid-twentieth-century anglophone Caribbean canon in particular have yet to fully explore the implications of inscrutability as a decolonial aesthetic.

A key claim of this book, as such, is that an emphasis on the receptive implications of inscrutability pervades midcentury Caribbean fiction, and that critical inattention to the receptive strategies of Caribbean inscrutability has often left many vital Caribbean authors unacknowledged, while more canonical writers are read in predictable and sometimes prescriptive ways. An analysis of Caribbean literature through the receptive implications of inscrutability thus allows us to establish compelling links across the mid-twentieth century that reveal thematic trends that have gone largely unnoticed and unexplored. Indeed, Caribbean authors have long wrestled with inscrutability and the implications of reception. As I see it, a Caribbean emphasis on difficulty and inscrutability begins in the late 1920s with work of Eric Walrond, C. L. R. James, and Jean Rhys and peaks in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the publication of Orlando Patterson’s radically experimental text An Absence of Ruins and the later inscrutable fictions of Denis Williams. In highlighting this trajectory of experimental Caribbean literature—and rethinking definitions of what is typically perceived as midcentury Caribbean literature—I thus seek to embolden new critical trajectories that put a seemingly disparate group of Caribbean writers, such as those of the Beacon group, Roger Mais, and Wilson Harris, in conversation with one another by analyzing the receptive implications of inscrutability and the frustration such writers’ works produce.

In this regard, though the history of Caribbean criticism and, more generally, definitions of periodization in Caribbean literature have evolved considerably over the past three decades, my usage of the term midcentury in this book no doubt requires some clarification, especially given its associations with the Windrush period and with the 1950s boom of largely male Caribbean writers such as George Lamming and Samuel Selvon. Definitions of midcentury, furthermore, generally do not extend from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. Accordingly, in working to reconceive how the concept of midcentury literature is typically deployed in Caribbean studies, I am particularly indebted to Alison Donnell’s work, which has long sought to establish a critical methodology that would help to redefine the often prescriptive and constraining nature of midcentury Caribbean literature. As Donnell argues, the frequently rigid emphasis on the midcentury—or, more specifically, the year 1950—as a watershed moment of Caribbean literary expression, and its thematic focus on masculine exile, has in many ways stifled critical analysis of lesser-known texts. As she notes, Some texts from the pre-1950 period have been brought into view but because the claims and narratives that have persistently kept the majority of works out of sight and marginal to configurations of the canon have not been self-reflective about their own exclusions, new conditions for their critical visibility have not yet been established (11). Indeed, rigid definitions of the midcentury boom often led to the exclusion of earlier and later texts, especially those that were not easily categorized, from critical conversations. Until recently, this was the case with works such as Eric Walrond’s 1926 collection Tropic Death, which had been largely omitted from discussions of similarly daring Caribbean experiments with form and reception. Confronting restrictive critical perceptions of midcentury Caribbean literature is an ongoing project, as recent works like Cambridge’s massive three-volume set Caribbean Literature in Transition (2020)—which seeks to reimagine the historical and critical purview of Caribbean literature—and Brown and Rosenberg’s Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature attest.⁵ My usage and redefinition of the term midcentury in this book, therefore, is in many ways intended to continue the work of unshackling twentieth-century readings of Caribbean literature from stubborn critical vantage points that often overlook the connections and resemblances between formally innovative works.

Of course, it must be noted that the struggle of articulation and frustration I examine in this book is in many ways reflected in the political and cultural unrest that dominated much of the Caribbean in the midcentury. The hope that the widespread labor revolts of the 1930s that spread across the Caribbean would engender new social and cultural reforms that resulted in more opportunity and equity was largely stifled by the onset of World War II. The British, who responded to the unrest by forming a commission to investigate what had taken place, ultimately failed to put in place the reforms demanded by workers and instead focused on the war effort and, in so doing, once again intimated the potential of coming reforms only to not enact them.⁶ In much the same way, the promise of the West Indian Federation collapsed into despair and a newfound sense of resentment and competition between Caribbean nations and not the brighter future that the federation promised. We can thus turn back to the literature of the midcentury and reorient our gaze toward the overwhelming and explicit frustration of the moment. Artistically, this same sense of genuine uncertainty and disorientation lingers throughout the period that, today, does not reveal the emergence of an effective literary counterculture or a weaponized social realist aesthetic that sparked, as the Beacon group hoped—a new aesthetic that challenged the foothold of colonial oppression to confront the drastic and overbearing consequences of the plantation system—but, rather, a pervasive struggle to reconcile conflicting ideologies of resistance into artistic form.⁷ This sense of artistic uncertainty, combined with the fear that independence, once achieved, would fail to create the kind of sustained social change and emancipation that it both promised and yearned for, reveals mid-twentieth-century Caribbean literature entrapped in a moment of impasse, in which a struggle to imagine a coherent or truly emancipated space fosters aesthetic interventions that are unable to represent a worldview that is scrutable, logical, or sensible.

This is not to say that formal experimentation in the Caribbean can be reduced to an allegory of national identity, but that the sense of frustration and longing that emerges along with civil unrest, labor revolts, and larger schemas of resistance against colonial authority helps to contextualize the sense of confusion, uncertainty, and disorientation that is undeniably present in Caribbean literature throughout the period. An emphasis, then, on what was possible and what could be achieved—both aesthetically and politically—remained, throughout the midcentury and throughout the works I discuss, thoroughly tentative and uncertain. Formal experimentation and semantic resistance, as well as the larger questioning of narrative forms and the very idea that a narrative had, as it were, a clear ending or outcome, thus reflect the larger sociopolitical Caribbean struggle to invent, or imagine, a new reality.

My aim in this book, however, is less about how experimental forms can be used as a means of negotiating burgeoning and conflicting ideologies of nationalism and resistance throughout the Caribbean, but more about how the understudied proliferation of experimental and receptive techniques that emerged in the region across the midcentury draw the reader into moments of crisis and confusion. My emphasis is on receptive engagement—that is, it is not on how the Caribbean texts I discuss depict the frustration of both legacies of colonial trauma and the uncertainty and confusion of the historical moment, but how they seek to produce it by instigating, through formal techniques, an emotive response on the part of the reader. My contention is that the difficulty of imagining seemingly impossible futures bred, throughout the mid-twentieth century, a myriad of experimental forms that placed often understudied and ignored demands on readers in ways that sought to replicate and enact the experiences of frustration, uncertainty, and aporia that were pervasive across the Caribbean.

Before continuing, it must be acknowledged that many of the texts I address are often—rightly or wrongly—perceived and labeled as exceedingly difficult. To be clear, my argument here is not that such texts are simply ignored, and that we should, accordingly, appreciate them, nor is my goal to render the inscrutable scrutable. Instead, I want to suggest that the kind of formal difficulty such texts engage in, which produce mechanisms of frustration and disorientation and embrace a kind of overt opaqueness, posit decoding as a decolonial, and some ways anticolonial, method that can generate new ways of understanding Caribbean aesthetics, as well as methodologies of colonial resistance as a whole. These works suggest that articulating the reverberations and repercussions of colonial dominance demand serious and invested effort and labor. Labor in this regard, however, should not be perceived as a path to total understanding or enlightenment, as such works also imply that no amount of labor can fully encapsulate or capture the entrenched nature of colonial violence. The overwhelming sense of confusion and disorientation these texts implement thereby highlights Caribbean experience as a tireless process of decoding, and a continuous, sometimes exhausting, struggle to put practices of oppression and exploitation into words.

Thus, all of the works I examine in this book employ acts of disorientation, frustration, and confusion to render historical moments, in part, inscrutable. In so doing, they argue that framing cultural and historical acts through the lens of abstraction and difficulty does not further obfuscate them, but encourages readers to engage in the necessary struggle to make sense of them. This book, then, is rooted in how inscrutability forces critical reflection on the part of the reader and, as such, addresses several key historical and cultural moments in the anglophone Caribbean, all of which are rendered inscrutable through narrative forms that coerce readers to adopt strategies of decoding and unraveling that acknowledges that reverberations of colonial violence cannot be easily expressed or understood. Accordingly, the scenes and sites of colonial violence I discuss are varied and widespread: they include the continued suppression and disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples in Guyana, the rise of Rastafarianism in Jamaica, Jim Crow labor laws and the construction of the Panama Canal, the Mau Mau rebellion, and the history of Afro-Caribbean erasure in Wales, among others. In searching for new ways to make sense of—and represent—these events and historical moments, these works repeatedly question whether it is at all possible to articulate a convincing vision of what an emancipated future might look like. They capture, in other words, the perpetual difficulty to narrativize the reverberations of colonial violence in literary form by frustrating the clarity and precision of their prose in a way that demands self-reflection, while acknowledging that the complexity of these events remain buried and suppressed. The experience, for example, of confronting the violent segregation of the Canal Zone as described by Eric Walrond through immensely difficult experiments with vernacular forces the reader to negotiate how language and race was used as a means of dehumanization in immediate, performative terms. I am interested in acknowledging the possibility that the effects of confusion and frustration on the reader—if the goal is to influence one’s views and interpretation of colonial violence—might, in fact, reveal and capture aspects of the trauma of colonialism that a realist (or scrutable) text cannot.

My argument thus responds to David Scott’s call to develop new problem spaces through which to analyze Caribbean and postcolonial literature by rethinking the nature of formal ingenuity in the Caribbean vis-à-vis its receptive strategies. I am drawn to Scott’s assertion, in Conscripts of Modernity, that the methodologies for which we confront anticolonial aesthetics have become both stale and ineffectual in light of the tragic failure of independence movements to create equitable spaces and overturn entrenched systems of oppression.⁸ Given the continued perpetuation of colonial forms of oppression, Scott thus questions the romantic nature of postcolonialism’s often idealistic framing of anticolonial resistance. As he writes,

anticolonialism has been written in the narrative mode of Romance, and consequently, has projected a distinctive image of the past (one cast in terms of what colonial power has denied or negated) and a distinctive story about the relation between that past and the hoped-for future (one emplotted as a narrative of revolutionary overcoming). But. . . after the end of anticolonialism’s promise, our sense of time and possibility have altered so significantly that it is hard to continue to live in the present as though it were merely a transitionary moment in an assured momentum from a wounded past to a future salvation.⁹ (209–10)

Scott’s point has important implications for this project, in that the works I address are not antiquated or utopic in their representation of anticolonial resistance; rather, they are unable to articulate a clear vision, or to imagine an emancipated present, with a coherent narrative form. They are undoubtedly anticolonial works, but they are above all unable to reconcile or fathom not only a sustained, active form of colonial resistance but also a discernible future. It is for this reason that the sense of impasse in these works that I have previously discussed is so important. It is not that impasse here represents a kind of stasis, but that it captures a perpetual longing for a mode of understanding with the capacity to be espoused in a form that will enact social and cultural transformation. A theory of textual inscrutability builds off of Scott’s rethinking of anticolonial romance in embracing the rejection of romantic linear resistance: none of the texts I am concerned with can muster a sense of an anticolonial future. My project, however, diverges from Scott’s in that it emphasizes that reconciling the atrocity of colonial oppression is itself immensely difficult to express; in drawing the reader into such problems of articulation, the texts I address struggle and fail to imagine a decolonized existence and, in so doing, capture the sense of bewilderment and hopelessness that is inextricably etched into Caribbean existence.

Form and Difficulty in Caribbean Fiction

This book, at its core, seeks to examine how textual mechanisms of inscrutability can generate new understandings of colonial trauma by drawing the reader into processes of frustration and disorientation. The midcentury works I discuss urge a new understanding of difficulty by suggesting that linear or didactic expressions of colonial violence often cannot properly convey experiences of loss and trauma in a way that effectively resonates with the potential reader. In contrast, the feelings of bewilderment, puzzlement, and disenchantment that authors like Denis Williams and Lindsey Barrett work to instill better capture, for the reader, a sense of the fracture and loss that is an integral aspect of colonial oppression. As such, the frustrated reader, whether or not they complete the text—or become too frustrated to continue—nevertheless engages in an attempt at decoding and unraveling and is forced, as it were, to think about how language and suffering is (and can be) articulated in the Caribbean. My approach in this book resists the pejorative connotations of difficulty and argues that the readerly act of negotiating a difficult text can reveal insights into Caribbean experience that are not otherwise visible. In this sense, my work builds off Édouard Glissant’s seminal theory of opacity, which calls for the radical embrace of difficulty as an integral aspect of Caribbean identity.

Any discussion of difficulty and inscrutability in the Caribbean must begin with the work of Glissant. Of course, Glissant’s theory of opacity remains, today, the most essential theorization of intelligibility and its implications. Glissant argues that opacity, in the Caribbean, is both a right and a form of resistance. In Caribbean Discourse, he petitions for what he calls a need for stubborn shadows that enact a perpetual concealment, which is our form of resistance (4). In a refusal to adhere to Western demands for transparency, Glissant’s work instead turns toward the refusal to answer or reveal oneself and in so doing rejects the very idea that Caribbean identity and experience can be articulated in terms of clarity, precision, or completeness. As Glissant warns, the presumption that a lack of cohesiveness suggests a moral or cultural failing is thus ideologically dangerous, in that it grafts a Western vision of culture and history onto Caribbean experience in a way that insists the Caribbean’s fractured colonial history is indicative only of its own inferiority and not a result of the centuries of colonial violence that dominated its history. As Glissant writes, The attempt to approach reality so often hidden from view cannot be organized in terms of a series of clarifications. We demand the right to obscurity. Through which our anxiety to have a full existence becomes part of the universal drama of cultural transformation: the creativity of marginalized peoples, who today confront the ideal of transparent universality, imposed by the West, with secretive and multiple manifestations of Diversity (2). In other words, Caribbean and creole experience, because it has been shattered into vast shards of multifaceted trauma and violence engendered by the slave trade, the plantation system, and the legacy of colonialism, occludes the potential of narrativizing history in a discernibly linear fashion.

My argument resituates Glissant’s work on opacity in terms of readerly reception, emphasizing how textual inscrutability forces readers to perceive the trauma of colonial violence in the Caribbean in more complex, visceral ways. After all, texts that privilege a sense of radical opacity—such as Orlando Patterson’s 1967 novel An Absence of Ruins or the work of Wilson Harris—suggest that it is only by lessening a reliance on clarity or simplicity that we can develop new reading practices that begin to confront the nuances of Caribbean experience. Such works expound on Glissant’s notion of shock and interruption as a means to access and understand fractured memory. As Glissant argues,

Many of us have never fully understood our historical times; we have simply experienced